Relevance of Rotationally Equivariant Convolutions for Predicting Molecular Properties
Abstract
Equivariant neural networks (ENNs) are graph neural networks embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and are well suited for predicting molecular properties. The ENN library e3nn has customizable convolutions, which can be designed to depend only on distances between points, or also on angular features, making them rotationally invariant, or equivariant, respectively. This paper studies the practical value of including angular dependencies for molecular property prediction directly via an ablation study with \texttt{e3nn} and the QM9 data set. We find that, for fixed network depth and parameter count, adding angular features decreased test error by an average of 23%. Meanwhile, increasing network depth decreased test error by only 4% on average, implying that rotationally equivariant layers are comparatively parameter efficient. We present an explanation of the accuracy improvement on the dipole moment, the target which benefited most from the introduction of angular features.
- Publication:
-
arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- August 2020
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2008.08461
- Bibcode:
- 2020arXiv200808461M
- Keywords:
-
- Computer Science - Machine Learning;
- Physics - Chemical Physics;
- Physics - Computational Physics;
- Statistics - Machine Learning
- E-Print:
- Machine Learning for Molecules Workshop at NeurIPS 2020, NeurIPS workshop on Interpretable Inductive Biases and Physically Structured Learning